James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

According to a study conducted by Stine Vogt and Svein Magnussen in Norway, the answer appears to be yes.

Trained artists, compared to non-artists, spent less time looking at the focal points (here, a face or a figure) and more time scanning the overall image. In both pairings the artist's scanpath is on the right; that of the non-artist is on the left.

This was true whether they were looking at the pictures without any relevant guiding instructions, or whether they were directed to concentrate on the images in order to remember them.--------Thanks, David Palumbo. Complete Story on Science Daily. Previous post on eyetracking.

24 comments:

Interesting. Any chance of seeing the images without the yellow lines? (I haven't linked to the original study yet.) It was mildly surprising to see no activity in the upper part of the second picture, the sunburst motif above the passageway.

Hmmmm. Wonder if would make a difference if there were a good looking woman standing in the middle?Another newbie to your blog Mr. Gurney. Can't believe I didn't find it sooner, but I found it thanks to your book Imaginative Realism. I've got a lot of work to do.

As someone whose skill at draftsmanship varies considerably depending on my current artistic focus, I can say that when my observational drawing skills are running high, it changes the way I see the world. It also changes the way I dream and even the way I edit prose.

Mark, yes, I think the training has a lot to do with it, since so much of art training is learning how to see.

And as you suggest, Sean, it's a kind of seeing or even thinking that goes beyond just the record of the movement of the center of vision. When I'm looking at a real scene that I'm painting, I'm more conscious of shifting focus and adjusting from narrow vision to peripheral awareness.

Welcome, Sam and all other new visitors. The book and the blog are sort of extensions of each other.

This also got me to thinking, do artists naturally see the world differently, or is it the training? Or both?

I know for myself, my powers of perception are much more keen now that I have been persuing art more seriously. And I realize that learning to see can be taught, but is there a mental shift that occurs? Once you see something you can never unsee it sort of thing.

I wonder about repeated viewings. For instance, take a painting like the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. Now I've studied that painting as a print and in person numerous times and I'm certain the journey my eye takes is different every time. The way we see tings at first may not be what we see upon successive viewings.

That's really fascinating and as someone who wasn't always a visual artist, I've definitely found myself looking at the whole picture more and more. And I have no formal training, it's just something that seemed relevant to my work, so I did it. hmmm....

Woah! This blew my mind! I remember thinking about this when I was looking at something on my trip to Japan. I was so eager to memorize every bit of this specific place I beheld, that I made sure to cover every detail, and started intentionally ignoring the focal points; and I was wondering if the people around me were doing the same! Who knew it was an artist thing!

I see it's been mentioned in previous comments but I guess it makes sense that observational drawing would lead to this kind of different 'habit' of perceiving things.

This is interesting. I can remember that there is once this study of where the eye is going around in images and words inside a webpage (not just an image) and as far as I can remember, there is an existing heat map as experts call it that is used to determine where an eye focuses in which part of any given webpage.

I am a blogger from the Philippines and I'm glad to have arrived here in your unique blog. - Ana

I wonder if it's an issue training vs. inherent differences. For instance, the way a musician hears music vs. someone who is not a musician? Would a savant of music hear the same tune as well as a trained musician?

I tend to annoy people when they post a picture and I point out something funnier in the background. Or when we are out and about and I point out some infinitesimal detail in a scene; I receive some odd looks. The entirety of it is what tells the story